Amity Shlaes challenges the received wisdom that the Great Depression occurred because capitalism broke and that it ended because FDR, and government in general, came to the rescue.

According to Shlaes, it was the government that made the Great Depression worse. And was FDR's progressivism, as evident in the New Deal, really all that new, or was it a step along a progressive continuum that already had been established?- Hoover Institution

Peter Robinson

Peter M. Robinson is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, where he writes about business and politics, edits the Hoover Institution's quarterly journal, the Hoover Digest, and hosts Hoover's television program, "Uncommon Knowledge."

Robinson is also the author of three books: How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life; It's My Party: A Republican's Messy Love Affair with the GOP; and the best-selling business book Snapshots from Hell: The Making of an MBA.

Amity Shlaes

Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a columnist for Bloomberg. Her work has appeared in publications from National Review to the New Yorker.
She is the author of Germany: The Empire Within, The Greedy Hand: How Taxes Drive Americans Crazy and What to Do about It, and, most recently, The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.